See what's new in Firefox beta 4

Mozilla have released the first public beta of Firefox 4, and whereas it’s not exactly stable thus far, the browser already includes a few worthy of note changes that are well worth a closer look.

Take Flash, for example - are you tired of applets crashing your browsing session? Mozilla are, as well, and so beta 4 gains fresh crash prevention features to prevent this from happening. If Flash, QuickTime or Silverlight go down or lock up then they will no longer bring down the whole browser, and you can just refresh the current page and attempt to view it again. Sounds fine.

One obvious interface fine-tune sees the tabs relocated to the very top of the browser window, which Mozilla say this is giving them “top visual priority for more efficient and intuitive browsing”. Everyone else will say it’s merely borrowing from Chrome, however whichever way, it does add up to for a cleaner, simpler interface.

Next along the same lines, it’s good to look at the menu bar replaced by a solo Firefox button, top left of the screen. Clicking this gives you access to a large amount of the options you could do with: New Window, Save Page As, Print, Find, History and so forth. And once more, it altogether helps to make simpler the browser, cutting down the amount of places where you must click to look for commands, as well as leaving the greatest quantity of area open for the web page you’re looking at.

The Add-Ons Manager has been redesigned, now taking up an entire tab of its own, and making it simpler to discover new extensions plus handle the ones you have already.

And elsewhere there are privacy improvements, fresh support for HTML5 and CSS3, and quite a few changes that may possibly grow to be very advantageous in the future. Indexed DB, for example, will let websites to store information locally, therefore apps like GDocs can operate even whilst you’re no longer linked to the internet.

There’s plenty to look at and running seems good quality for a beta. If you’d like to give it a check out, then download your copy here.